"Sometimes I pretend I am in a sitcom," a colleague tells me when I mention a frustrating encounter. "That way all the annoying people are just quirky characters keeping things interesting."
I'm quoting the lines above because they ring true, but must give full credit to the Australian Booksellers Association's recent e-newsletter for tipping me off about bookseller/writer Freya Howarth's 2019 "Retail therapist" piece in Overland magazine.
Howarth cited one of my favorite novels in recent years, Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman (Grove Press, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori) and protagonist Keiko Furukura, "alert to the subtle sounds of the shop in which she works.... She modulates her behavior, from her smile and cheery tone of her voice to the exact words she speaks, to align with the company manual. She is the perfect worker."
Noting she recognized part of herself in Keiko because of "the habits I have developed over nine years of working in bookshops," Howarth wrote that she had "perfected the choreography of customer service: the greeting of the customer, the song and dance of payment ('Cash or card?'), the Pavlovian response to the metallic ping of the till drawer, the knack for pushing it closed with a hip while pulling a paper bag from under the counter, parting rustling paper and sliding in the neatly stacked books. I am good at this. Sometimes I am even great at this. But what does it mean to be good at what is seen and paid as unskilled work?"
One thing it means, speaking as someone who spent more than three decades in retail--split evenly between the grocery business and bookselling--is that our definition of "unskilled work" is often bullsh*t. When I worked for supermarkets, customers lined up at my register because I was fast and proud of it. The aisles I stocked were faced off and dusted. I was polite. I was a modified, if decidely more cynical version of Keiko.
One of my favorite stories from Studs Terkel's classic book Working is of Babe Secoli, the supermarket checker who says, "It's hard work, but I like it. This is my life.... I'm just movin'--the hips, the hand, and the register, the hips, the hand, and the register.... You just keep goin', one, two, one, two. If you've got that rhythm, you're a fast checker. Your feet are flat on the floor and you're turning your head back and forth.... If somebody interrupts to ask me the price, I'll answer while I'm movin'. Like playin' a piano."
Howarth observed that there "is a satisfaction, a jolt of pleasure, that comes from doing something well, from disappearing into a role. A feeling of moving fluidly through a space, confident and uninterrupted, never being snagged or lost. But there is also an emotional toll that comes from playing this part.... This emotional labor is an often overlooked aspect of retail work. Each customer requires a subtly different approach."
While exploring the many practical challenges of bookselling as a longterm profession, she wrote: "As a teenager, I imagined bookselling to be the ultimate part-time job. I never imagined I would be doing it in my late twenties, still unsure what I want from my working life. Being faced with this reality has provoked feelings of uncertainty and despair, emotions that have only intensified with the realization that my situation is a symptom of a much bigger problem. I dread the time when my bookshop job will switch from being viewed as desirable, intellectual, even romantic, to being a sign that I am squandering my potential and failing to grow up. Maybe this is already happening. Sometimes I talk my job down before anyone else can.... For all the artifice and the emotional labor, I have come to define myself by my work as a bookseller."
I became a bookseller at 42, so I'd already conceded somewhat (though a shadow definitely lingered) the whole "squandering my potential and failing to grow up" downside of frontline bookselling. At the time, the new job was actually a step up from the work I'd been doing shortly before being hired by the bookstore.
But here's the thing. When I started bookselling in the early '90s, the "retail sales floor as theater space" was a popular model for business gurus to flog, so I was well trained to make the transition to sitcom work. This realization grew substantially when I first saw the BBC version of The Office and later the NBC spinoff. Was there a documentary crew filming us at the bookstore every day? I think maybe there was.
Sometimes I pretend I am in a sitcom.
"Excuse me, I'm looking for a book with a blue cover by that guy who was on the Today Show." #JimLooksAtTheCamera
"Where's your nonfiction section?" #JimLooksAtTheCamera
"Are you a cash register?" #JimLooksAtTheCamera
"I know you've been stuck at the info desk all day, but we really need to get these books shelved before you leave." #JimLooksAtTheCamera
Earlier this week, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers announced that next October it will publish The Office: A Day at Dunder Mifflin Elementary by Robb Pearlman, illustrated by Melanie Demmer, to celebrate the series' 15th anniversary.
#JimLooksAtTheCamera... and then pre-orders the book for his kids.